In the following essay, Doyle examines Cisneros's utilization of the La Llorona myth in her story “Woman Hollering Creek” and argues that the story “charts psychological, linguistic, and spiritual border crossings.”

Aiiii aiiii aiiiii

She is crying for her dead child

the lover gone, the lover not yet come:

Her grito splinters the night

—Gloria Anzaldúa, “My Black Angelos,” Borderlands/La Frontera1

“If I were asked what it is I write about,” Sandra Cisneros commented in a lecture in 1986, “I would have to say I write about those ghosts inside that haunt me, that will not let me sleep, of that which even memory does not like to mention.”2 Poverty, the unrecorded lives of the powerless, the unheard voices of “thousands of silent women,” are some of the ghosts that...